The bodies of water around the world have
always been home to monsters. From the Lochs and Loughs of Scotland and Ireland
where reports of man-eating Kelpies and then in the modern years' plesiosaur
like creatures who shy away from the toils of man. To the oceans where
countless monsters supposedly have been reported slithering and attacking
vessels. It's in these watery biomes we see a biological occurrence that, if
these creatures do exist, would need to happen, and that is the existence of a
biodiversity. A biodiversity is simply the variety of different forms of life in
a particular habitat. With cryptids and cryptid reports outside of humans
witnessing these creatures or potentially the creature's predation on the local
fauna, the creatures seen typically are alone or seem to have just popped into
our world hence why the interdimensional or extraterrestrial hypothesis has
sprung up even in cases where there is nothing to truly suggest this theory. In
aquatic biomes, more than any other habitat, we see the most not only of
variation of creatures reported but also the interaction of the creatures with
their environment. Aside from sasquatch, these creatures are perhaps the most
biologically realistic as our oceans, lakes, and rivers makeup to 71% of the
planet and are plenty big enough for countless species to live and interact
undiscovered.
The first official detailed account of the
creature can be found in Scott C. Marlowe’s book Cryptid Creatures of
Florida. The first creature, which has been called the Astor Monster, came
to public fruition in 1953 when the creature was reportedly sighted by a
"Buck" Dillard, who was Barney Dillard Senior's grandson. Now Barney
Dillard Senior plays a slight importance to this account, mainly in the
importance of the account. Barney Dillard Senior was one of the first settlers
to the city of Astor, arriving in the town as an infant in 1866. Dillard Senior
had helped discover the Spanish Mission of San Salvador de Mayaca and the
remains of Fort Antonio de Anacape and retraced all the old Spanish Trails
throughout the state, including "Dragoon Trail". Seeing as how
important Barney was to the community as well as for local and state history,
any account with a connection to his name holds a kind of weight to it. A
Keelian certainly would see the synchronicity as Buck Dillard, the grandson of
Barney who essentially rediscovered "Dragon Trail", would go and have
an encounter with the modern interpretation of a dragon.
Buck was a river guide and utilized all
the information he gleaned from his sage grandfather in his tours along the
river and pathways and helped guide the tourists to places where unusual fauna
to them could be found, most specifically those freshwater potatoes, the
manatees and the various swamp birds in the area. Buck proceeded to take a Mr and Mrs Art Myers
from St. Louis, Missouri fishing on Sunday 18th 1953 on Lake Dexter,
which connects to the St. Johns River and is 4 miles south of the Astor Bridge.
The creature rose from the water a mere 30ft from their boat and proceeded to
come near the family’s boat and looked at them for about a minute or two before
submerging. The
creature was monstrous in appearance and something he, in his experience, had
clearly never seen before. The creature was 30-40ft long and had a body not
unlike that of an elephant with the dull gray skin of one as well. This would
be startling enough, but the creature had one feature as he looked at the
creature's head that clearly would have been more worrisome, for there sticking
out was a single horn that came from the forehead of the creature. The horn,
while clearly something that was meant for violent interactions, was offset by
the creature's large soft eyes, which appeared placid. Buck, in an interview in
the October 25th edition of the Orlando Sentinel, would break
down the encounter stating, "I was looking around on the river when I
first saw him. I said, looky there, what in the hell is that thing? All we saw
was his head; it was sticking up in the middle of the water about five feet,
and it had a horn 10 inches long in the middle of its head. The horn was the
color of a cow’s horn, and it curved downwards, and his head was 3ft wide. He
was a light grey color, and it looked like he was covered with skin; instead of
fur or scales, we couldn't see anything but his eyes and his horn. His eyes
were about 18 inches apart/ He looked at us for about a minute; he went under
the water and swam under the water away from us; we waited about two hours in
that same spot to see if he would come up again, but he didn't." They
claimed to of never seen it again. Buck would claim, "I’ve never seen
anything like it before. I know what manatees are. I’ve seen schools of 25
manatees there in the river all the time. I’ve seen some of them 800 to 900lbs
in size and 15 ft long. I’ve been on the river 35 years, and I’ve never seen
anything like it before, but I’ve seen a lot of other queer things that come
from the Atlantic Ocean”. Buck believes that this creature came from the
Atlantic Ocean and came into the St. Johns there. Buck believes that this
creature might have been responsible for running whales on the beach of the
east coast a few years ago.
While Buck and the St. Louis couple were
the official eyewitnesses, they would not come forward with their sightings to
the media until days and weeks after their initial encounter. Don L. McNulty, who was a local fishing camp
operator of the boats the couple acquired, was the first person to bring this
mystery to the public eye as the group with Don’s son Phil would go and tell
his father how aside from the St. Louis Couple another of the boaters had
encountered the creature that day. Don would claim that the couple would go on
to say that none of the witnesses took much mind of the color or whether the
beast had scales or fleshy skin. He would go on to add that the witnesses
claimed that the creature bore a round nose like a hippopotamus, and it seemed
more like a reptile than a fish but said it didn’t look like an alligator. He
would also claim that the couples who had visited the area numerous times were
sober people.
The next reported sighting which was
brought to Don’s attention occurred on the same day and a mere 4 miles from
Lake Dexter, where the creature was reportedly seen earlier than the St. Louis
couple. A man reportedly saw the creature swimming along the riverbank and
claimed that as he watched, the animal walked up onto the bank and disappeared
into the forest. The witness would go on to say, “He walked on all four legs,
but he walked awkwardly.” In the book Cryptid Creatures of Florida by
Scott C. Marlowe, the author would go and claim that Buck would go and have at
the most three other sightings of the creature, including one on land but this,
at least from newspaper accounts and other resources, does not seem to be
validated outside of the initial Lake Dexter account; however, Marlowe claims
that this encounter was, in fact, his second and that his first was on land
near Dragoon Trail.
The next reported
sighting came from a Mrs Robert Seymour of Barberville when on October 19,
1953, while out fishing in a boat on the St. Johns, she would have a close
encounter with the creature. She was near the Astor Bridge when the creature
stuck its head out of the water. Mrs Seymour would state, "I was so
frightened I rowed to the shore and stopped fishing". Another sighting
around this time frame came from Count A. Wass de Czege, who is deeply
connected to the St. Johns River Monster. The Count was a local restaurant
owner but also the editor of the Astor News; he claimed that he received
information that two visitors to the area from Orlando claimed to of seen the
same creature about a half-mile from Blue Creek. The Blue Creek sighting was
later confirmed to of been 1 ½ miles north from the account Mrs Robert Seymour
encountered and 3 ½ miles north of Dillard's sighting. With the Blue Creek
sighting, the total number of reported witnesses to the St. Johns River monster
was half a dozen, but more were soon to follow. The Count, while skeptical of
this creature, would slightly change his tune when his father-in-law would come
forward with his own bizarre finding that might be connected with the creature.
W. G. McClain noticed that hyacinths were disappearing in the bucket loads from
the river. McClain would later suggest that this creature was presumably a
vegetarian and was eating them by the acre. McClain would state in an
interview, "maybe the hyacinths attracted him, but if he is eating them,
he should be protected."
After the Blue Creek sighting rewards were
being offered for the capture of the beast, one particular offer was $5,000
alive or $1000 dollars dead by Owen Godwin, who was the owner of Godwin's Snake
Village at Kissimmee. The only stipulation for the reward was that the reward
was only payable if the creature was 30ft long and did bear a horn on his head.
A less extravagant prize was offered from Mel Larson, a former Midwest manager
for the Reader's Digest Association; he offered a $100 cash reward for the
monster stating, "If it has four legs and lives in the water, it must be a
mammal. If it was placed in a cage and made a tourist attraction, it would be
one of the biggest drawing cards in Florida." However, neither reward was
ever claimed.
The accounts of the time drew some
governmental interest, albeit some sarcastic interest but interest,
nonetheless. A letter from former state attorney J.W. Hunter of Tavares wrote
that it knew of the creature but believed it to of been extinct, going so far
as to dub the creature Borinkus. He would claim that Barney Dillard, who still
lives at Volusia, used to use a team of them to power his ferry across the
river. He offers a rather grotesque method to capturing the creature by taking
a passel of cats from Leesburg to offer as a kind of bait for the creature so
that it can be exhibited for the school children of the country.
Jack Miller of Jacksonville, Arno
Richardson, and Mary Lou Arno's daughter had an encounter of seeing the
creature while out bow hunting for deer. The group proceeded to park halfway
between Alexander Springs and Astor Park, and the group began the long, arduous
trek toward the river at 3 pm. The group managed to follow a deer print they
came across more than a mile in the wilderness when the group came to a swampy
thicket at 5 pm to set up camp. The two men and the 18-year-old girl proceeded
to push their way through the thickets. Whereas they approached a thicker
section of the woods, the branches seemed to shake and creak mainly in front of
miller. It was then that a strange smell permeated in the area it was a
terrible smell, and as the group looked in the area where the shaking branches
occurred, the area was merely 20 ft away, and they could tell that behind it
was a large creature but its exact appearance they could not make out. Jack
tried to make it to a clearing where he could attempt to make a shot. Mary Lou, either brave or stupid, proceeded in
approaching the creature as it continued to shake the branches. Jack Miller, in
an air of concern, shouted, “Stop! Be careful!” At the sound of her father’s friend’s
voice, the giant creature seemed to be startled and began to run, making
terrible cries as it ran away. Mary Lou, at that moment, realizing the imminent
danger, proceeded to scream as the creature ran towards the safety of the
river. Mary Lou said, "was the most curious beast I have ever seen in my
life. It was gray clumsy, and huge, 5 or 6 ft tall at the shoulders and rapidly
towering so that its tail was no taller than a foot or so. It had a long, thick
neck a d it held its head much higher than its shoulders. The head seemed to be
above the bushes and was like that of a great snake or lizard, with the
difference that this something had a horn on his forehead curling forward
toward the nose. It was like an animal with a horned lizards head and a long
lizard's tail, but the body of a four-legged mammal. The mouth was not of an
alligator, but more that od a cow, and the eyes, also". As they followed
the creature, they ended up coming across a set of tracks that the monster made
in the mud that the witnesses described "like that of a snowplow". Miller
would later add that the animal seemed to be a peaceful vegetable eater,
"but we still felt better when we reached our car." In November 1st, 1953, edition of
the Orlando Sentinel, the creature was reportedly seen again. The
creature was seen this time by two women and a girl who described it as having
“an ugly bitter smell and big soft cow eyes”.
On November 8, 1953, the search for the
creature was in full swing as in between that time another 3 witnesses leading
to a total of 9 that allegedly came forward claiming to see the creature.
Hunters during that time would go out gun in hand, searching for the beast.
Some were allegedly claiming to hear bizarre noises, which they trigger happily
shot at. Yet while there was many who wanted to bag a beast, many people from
Lake County wrote to the paper saying, “a great number of hunters are looking
for our monster, but we sincerely hope they will catch it alive or take some
pictures of it. It would be a shame to destroy some kind of rare specimen of
wildlife as long as it does not harm anybody.”
On November 21st, 1953, news
broke that the monster managed to leave something other than eyewitness
accounts as once again reports broke out of an unidentified track attributed to
the creature being found. This track, however, was found on a small island in
Lake Dexter, the first place the creature was reportedly seen by Buck Dillard
and the St. Louis couple. The track was discovered three weeks after the last
reported sighting and in an area where the monster was reportedly seen twice.
Count A. Wass de Czege said that the track was found in two separate locations
where the creature he felt was sunbathing.
After a string of tracks was found,
sightings of the monster seemed to stop for the winter until 1954. The total of
eyewitnesses by January was a startling 20 people, but this number would be
expanded upon as on March 4, 1954, an Art and Gin Meyer were the first
witnesses of the year to encounter the monster. Art and Gin were no strangers to
the area and knew the local flora and fauna, yet this was their first time
seeing the creature after visiting for the 9th season.
In May, the creature was seen by someone
even more reputable that being a wildlife officer. Accounts of the cryptozoological
that come from those who are alleged experts of their associated field always
seem to hold more weight than those of the inexperienced eye. While the
officials' name and even experience other than his claim is not recorded, it
does raise some intriguing validity for what others in the area and of a
similar field attributed to a misidentification. The only quote we do have from
this witness on the sighting appeared on June 18, 1954, when the man expressed
distress after his sighting because he didn't happen to have his camera with
him at the time to capture the anomaly on film.
As the years went on, reports came in less
and less, and many articles from 1955-1961 appeared to be comical satire, fluff
pieces, or memorandums to the mystery. It is in some of these articles that
some unique hypotheses of the creature's origin were speculated, which ranged
from everything from the mundane such as a misidentified manatee, to more
exotic possibilities, such as an escaped UFO occupant but more on those later.
The last officially reported sighting appeared to come on December 4, 1955,
when the creature was supposedly seen lumbering around in the Ocala National
Forest just a few weeks before the publication. This most recent sighting was
not alone, for a similar creature was claimed to of been seen by several
fishermen in Lake George, another lake that connects to the St. Johns. Details
on these sightings, however, are extremely slim.
The creature seemed to of finally returned
to the sea after these bulk of sightings or simply went unreported as the area
focused on alternative news coverage. The river seemed quiet for many years
until 1975, when a totally different and even more bizarre anomaly would make
its self-known on the St. Johns. This one would gain a sort of pseudo cryptid
fame in recent years due to its bizarre skin color, which would give it the
perfectly peculiar name of “pinky”.
Mrs Dorothy Abram, her husband, Charles,
Mrs Brenda Langley, Ed St. John, and Wallace McClean were out fishing in the
Abram’s new boat on the St. Johns. It was about 10 am, and the group had
enjoyed the sun and tranquil waters, but Charles Abram had noticed an incoming
storm on the horizon. Deciding that there was no use fishing in weather like
that, he had begun to move towards the boats motor pulling on the chord to get
the boat back to shore. Mrs Langley, meanwhile, while they waited for the boat
to rev to life, stared placidly out at the water when she noticed a strange
form slowly rise from the surf. The boat was stopped as Mrs Langley continued
to stare at the strange object.
Mrs
Langley saw the creature first when it slowly proceeded to raise its head three
feet above the water. Detailing her account in the several newspapers that
covered the story, she noted, "What’s that big thing over there?" She
had said, and no one believed her. Mrs Abrams said, "Bless her heart, I
told her it was some fish jumping". She soon after the third time of
attempting to get everyone's attention at the figure, she said, "That's a
big old sea monster", she continued “, I saw this thing about 50 yards
away. I thought, my God, what is that! Then it came closer. It was checking us
out; it was really curious what we were." The creature was above the water
for about eight seconds and was a mere 20ft from the boat.
Mrs
Abram and Mrs Langley would go on to describe their encounter thusly in various
newspapers and in Argosy "We saw it had a neck about 3 feet long. It had
two little horns on top of the head like a snail. It was about three or four
feet out of the water and about the color – a pinkish color – like boiled
shrimp. It had a real ugly looking face on it, and he had big, dark slanted
eyes. It had snail-like horns, and it had this little jagged thing going down
its back. The head turned on it. It just turned and looked around at us. He
turned his head like you and I. Then it came closer. It was checking us out. It
was really curious what we were, and it wasn’t scared of us! The horrible thing
disappeared, then came back up about 20 feet away. It was so ugly looking, like
pictures you see of dragons. It had a large head as big or bigger than a human
head with two little horns. Well, they weren't very little snail-type horns,
little horns or fins along the back of its long neck and a mouth that turned
down at the edge. He looked like a skeleton. He was real jagged looking on the
side of his head were flaps, I guess some kind of gills hanging down. But it
didn’t look harmful”. Dorothy would add, "It looked like a dinosaur with
its skin pulled back, so all its bones were showing." And "We could
see it clear he didn't look harmful. He was just ugly. He looked over towards
us, sort of curious like. Then he just went under. It was like you were in the
water. It was like You were in the water and just bent your head down. The
water was really calm. There wasn't a ripple when he went under. He appeared to
be heading towards the ocean." Charles Abram, who was preoccupied with
getting the boat's motor started, did not notice the creature until the boat
had already started to turn. Charles would go on to say, "I just saw the
neck. It was a long neck, I'll tell you that much. The women were scared to
death. And I wasn't drunk". To add to her husband's account, Mrs Abram
verified, "No, we weren't drinking. There was no alcohol on board, but
I'll tell you one thing, we needed a good one after that!".
Charles Abram, who is the president of Harrell
Glass and Supply co “It was so strange I thought no one would believe us”.
Dorothy Abram would go on to say, "Had I not seen it, I wouldn't have
believed it". The group proceeded to wait to report their sighting though
the exact reason why was not stated; it can easily be speculated Mrs Langley
gave the following response "Now I think we should talk to someone. I
would like to find out what it was". One hypothesis offered by several
wildlife biologists was what the group saw was nothing more than a sturgeon,
but Mrs Abrams went to the library to see what a sturgeon looked like and said
the following "When I saw pictures of a sea sturgeon, I knew that's not
what I saw. A sturgeon has a long-pointed nose, and this thing had a neck and
head. You know it was turning its head around, and the neck was perfectly
still; it was like you would turn your head to see what's going on; it was no
sturgeon. I'm positive it looked like a dinosaur with its skin pulled back, so
all its bones were showing".
As their report hit the papers for weeks,
the group received phone calls from several others who had claimed to of seen
the same or similar creatures in the St. Johns River. "One lady called me
and said 20 years ago she and some other people had seen the same thing, and no
one believed them", said Mrs Abrams. "And a gentleman from Atlanta
called me. He described almost exactly what we had seen and said he had seen it
before several other people have said the same thing".
While "Pinky" had taken over the
media during 1975, it was not the only creature reported to dwell in the river
that year. On December 15, 1975, two fishermen named Bobby Holt and
Larry Atkinson were out fishing on the Fuller Warren Bridge when they would
encounter a peculiar creature that seemed much different from the creatures
previously reported in the river. The two would go on to describe their
encounter with the 20 ft creature in the following “I've been fishing out there
a lot of years, and I've never seen anything like it. It was black and shiny
and slippery-looking. This was one particular object, and it wasn't a sea cow
because they're bulky and usually stay closer to shore. The thing I saw was out
in the middle of the channel under the bridge, and as it swam, its humps came
completely out of the water. It looked like a sea serpent. We were both baffled. I have no earthly idea what it was. It was
round like a big snake, but it wasn't a snake. I saw ahead, a round head like
you see in pictures of those prehistoric dinosaurs or like a giant eel of some
kind. It wasn't an otter, wasn't sea cows, and it wasn't a snake. Snakes swim
sideways, and this thing, whatever it was, had humps, and it was moving in an
up-and-down motion. Snakes don't do that”.
John Baumgartner, a foreman for the San
Marco Public Works and several of his crew, had decided to take a break and
enjoy the sunny day. The crew managed to meander their way down to the
riverbank of the St. Johns. The crew had just unwrapped their sandwiches and
chips when the sound of bubbling arose. The crew looked out in surprise as a
dark shape rose from the water; the dark form rose higher with a
"watermelon-sized head". Water seemed to spurt from the nostrils of
the creature as it made loud snorting noises. John Baumgartner would later
describe his and his crew’s encounters thusly:
“What drew our attention was the snort. It
came up and snorted, and I could see the spray come off its nose. It hung there
for a second, and down it went again. It stayed up just long enough to where
you could see it good. It was like a snake, a big, thick snake, a good foot in
thickness, going up and down. When it came up and snorted, it was so close, I
could see the spray. He [the creature] just looked around, took a breath, and
the rest of his body went down. Its head looked like a big football, real dark.
He was humped up in the water, and all I could see was the head and a little
bit of the back as he went down. It looked sort of like a walrus or a sea
lion-like you see up in Canada, but it was real long, with a snout or something
like that. It went down in sections, like a hump and then finally, the tail
came over. The tail was flat, like the rudder of a plane. I've read a lot of
nature books, but I've never seen anything like it. It was nothing like a sea
cow, and there's no way it was otters. I've hunted otters before, and I know
one when I see one”. The crew watched in disbelief as the creature proceeded to
dip back down into the water. The crew stood motionless at the waters edge for
almost half an hour, totally exceeding their break, waiting in held breath for
the creature to resurface from the depths, but it never did.
A mere hour after Baumgartner and his
crews sighting a man by the name of Dave Green while driving the Fuller Warren
Bridge proceeded to look out over the expanding rushing river; while looking
out, he noticed a large, strange form traversing the murky waves he would
describe it like “an eel with a rigged hump down the middle of it.". Green
watched the bizarre beast swim, but while he was focused on the aquatic anomaly
he was certainly not paying attention to the road. As expected in this kind of
situation, he almost managed to drive his car off the road.
In July of 1976, a year after the pinky
sighting, 25 people would report seeing the creature on the river while hanging
out at Stockton Park. All of the witnesses claimed to report seeing a
serpentine creature with a “basketball-sized head,” the witnesses were able to
see the creature moving around the water for a full 10 minutes before finally
submerging to the startled onlookers. Kathy Kirkland, one of the many witnesses
who saw the creature, went and felt that the creature's reason for appearing
was that it was feeding on the fish in the river “I had a line in the water
when it first came up, and I thought it was headed toward my bait. “At first, I
thought it was three sea cows, but after watching it a while, I realized it was
all connected together. Wherever the head would go, the tail would follow.”
While the mass sighting that occurred in
July implied that something was, in fact feeding on the organisms living
therein. On November 21, 1976, near Chicopit Bay, a female fisherman would, in
fact, have a first-hand encounter of this feeding. While out fishing, the girl
noticed that her fishing line jerked and spun as though an extreme strength had
taken the bait. At first, she had thought that this bizarre tugging was a
common fish; this
was not to be the case, however, for as the line was drawn out deeper into the
water, a strange form seemed to rise in tangent to the surface. While the
fisherman stared at the form, she was not alone as others noticing the skirmish
on the water started to conglom on the shores; however, while there were
countless witnesses, they all had described it the same way. It was described
as being around 8 feet long, dark green in color and as one witness would
describe “looked like a prehistoric animal with high ridges on its back and an
alligator tail with a white round head like a basketball.”
After the 70s, reports of the monster
would go on hiatus, but In 1993 a witness by the name of Pamela Hicks would
change all that. Pamela was out lounging on her balcony in her high-rise
apartment one particular bright day. The building faced the St. Johns River,
and she was blankly staring out at the serene pool. While staring out at the
liquid mirror, she noticed a dark form rising up from the depths. While this
dark form seemed trapped under the other side of the liquid glass, this was not
to be the case, for soon, a bizarre form arose from the underside of the water.
Pamela would go on to describe the encounter “It was dark grey with a long,
skinny neck and the first thing I thought of was the Loch Ness Monster. You
know, it was years ago that I saw it. Still, every time I look out across the
river, I can’t help looking for whatever it was. But I know I’ll never be lucky
enough to see it again”.
While the sighting in 1993 marks the last
officially recorded account of something anomalous swimming in the St. Johns
River, the legend continues to live on. The creature has gained a minor cryptid
cult following, namely because of Pinky and even spawned a secondary nickname
to echo in on the "Nessie" trend with the name Johnnie. There even is
a researcher who has a devotion to studying the creature. Simon Smith, a
reptile keeper and a so-called "amateur cryptozoologist", has been
keeping tabs on the mysterious marine monsters that swim in the St. Johns and
even claims to have intimate knowledge about what the supposed gender of the
creature in the river is and why there are so many different colored creature
reports “Johnnie is a she a fact that should be obvious to anybody ever studied
Marine Science.” He
would say in
an article for the Jaxson. “He considers various testimonies of Johnnie
being black or dark gray or brown or beige or pink nonsensical discrepancies.
The abrasions of sand and salt and water and sun on skin contribute easily to
such a spectrum”.
The St. Johns River is certainly the
perfect location to hide something anomalous in some places the St. Johns is
two miles wide, and in other places, it's 80-foot deep. While I think it's
obvious that there is no "resident" river monster as there would be
with lake cryptids, I do feel that this river has been used as a cryptid
highway during its time as there appears to be a variety of marine and
semiaquatic creatures that have at one point, or another travelled through. The
reasons for this could be due to a search for food or, much like oceanic eels
or salmon, an area for spawning. Yet when looking at all these reports, it's
incredibly bizarre that there is such a high density of various cryptids
reported in intervals of 20 years.
Breaking down what some of these cryptids
might be is very difficult as almost all of them are certainly different
species. The creature from 53 is a semi-aquatic horned hippo crocodile-like
creature, Pinky is a bizarre gilled, maned, spiked, snailhorned dragon, and the
creatures from the alternative 76' and 93' sightings were black and green in
color and looked like classic loch ness lake cryptids. Now some of the theories
for these creatures have ranged from manatees to even UFO escapees. In 53',
there was a string of UFO sightings above the River, and as soon as the UFO
sightings stopped, the reports rolled in of the River Monster. Skeptics at the
time pointed to manatees or sturgeon as perhaps being the creature reported,
but with many of the witnesses being familiar with these local fauna, this is highly
unlikely. Scott C. Marlowe, in his book Cryptid Creatures of Florida,
felt that the creature seen in 53' had a matching description to another
cryptid reported. However, unlike the sasquatch universal, where Bigfoot is
reported in almost every state, making it reasonable for some kind of migratory
route. The creature Marlowe felt was a dead ringer was a creature reported from
the Democratic Republic of the Congo known as the Emela-Ntouka. This creature
had a single horn; the hippopotamus like snout was semiaquatic and was a
greyish color. Now the obvious problem with this is that the Emela-Ntouka is
from Africa, and for a semiaquatic creature to travel from Africa to Florida is
highly unlikely but not impossible. Another candidate that I thought of when hearing
this encounter was that of the White River Monster. The White River Monster was
described colour-wise very much the same way and in some accounts also had a
large horn that grew from its forehead. It could be possible that both
creatures are the same species and travel terrestrially from river to river and
live on small islands when not swimming in the water.
Pinky is perhaps the most difficult to
compare to because there is honestly very little exactly like it. In many ways,
Pinky is like an acid trip Heuvelman's sea serpent sighting as the creature has
features from countless of the various species that Heuvelman's described in
his book In the Wake of the Sea Serpent and that Loren Coleman would
then also use in The Field Guide to Lake Monsters, Sea Serpents, and Other
Mystery Denizens of the Deep. Some features such as the creature’s mane,
the gills, the horns are from allegedly different species reported in different
water locales. The horns are something that is reported in a lot of lake
monster encounters such as Loch Ness and even in Lake Champlain, Manes have
been reported in a variety of sea serpent accounts such as Cadborosaurus, and
Gills are reported in the giant fish like lake and sea monster reports. While
this creature does not match any of the officially reported cryptids, it also
has nothing similar in the fossil record either this creature is completely
alien, and I have no idea how to even speculate that it came around.
The other 70s and 90s accounts are classic
black or dark green sea serpents; they are the stone-cold classics that have
shown up time and time again in cases like Gloucester and even the HMS Daedalus
account. They also have perhaps the widest gambit of what they could be, for
they could be everything from colossal Oarfish to mammoth eels to actual sea
serpents to some prehistoric marine reptile; there are countless possibilities
for what these creatures are, and unfortunately, the reports are too far away
to get any unique features that might eliminate some of these possibilities.
River monsters are a staple of cryptozoology; they are some of the earliest cryptids reported in America and elsewhere, showing up in newspapers and causing great panic along the banks. These creatures have always intrigued me the most from a biological level, for many times, these creatures just happen to work their way upstream. The sightings are inconsistent in most cases and, as seen in the St. Johns, almost always have a huge diversity of what the creature is to look like. It is in these cases I have to wonder are we safe in any water source? Our lakes, lochs, and loughs are teeming with potentially deadly creatures, our oceans have countless tales of carnivorous sea serpents and shipwrecking krakens, and our rivers are home to the in-between the creatures that seem to be misfits that just happen to take up residence there. While there have been very few reported fatalities caused by river monsters and none as far as what one can tell in the St. Johns, it raises the question is there no reports because as Abram's and her party claimed that these creatures are peaceful or is it that there have been encounters that no one knows about because the sole witness was swept away not by the turning tides but by the mouth of a colossal creature.
No comments:
Post a Comment